E-books ease case searches

Major legal publishers aim to reshape the reading habits of lawyers and law students as they rush out e-book ­collections this year.

LexisNexis Australia last week launched 21 of its titles as e-books, with another 60 due in the next six months. Rival Thomson Reuters hopes to release select law and tax titles in e-book format by the same time, and CCH Publishing Australia & New Zealand has announced it will have its full list of books, which cover law and other professional services, available as e-books before 2012.

Publishers say e-books will revolutionise legal practice, but law firm knowledge managers say there are a number of issues to work through before e-books become widespread.

Freehills’ director of knowledge and information technology, Nicole Bamforth, said the distribution channels publishers chose for their e-books would be “critical" for firms.

“Firms aren’t going to necessarily want to get locked into just having a single [e-reader] format," she said.

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“So if LexisNexis comes up with a format and it’s not transferable between devices, that actually complicates things for us."

The firm, which will relocate its Sydney office in 2013, would consider e-books when deciding how much space it needed for its new library, she said, although “there will always be a paper collection. Some things are just easier for lawyers to work with [by] having a paper copy".

But publishers and firms agreed e-books would reduce the need for paper books over time.

CCH director of books Jonathan Seifman said some physical “bricks and mortar" legal bookstores were likely to close, but booksellers could stay afloat by focusing on online.

Clayton Utz national information services manager Maria Thiveos said even if e-books were widely available, firms would still need to buy hard copy books because many lawyers did not have a portable e-reader such as an iPad or an Amazon Kindle.

And while e-books could be accessed more widely, the cost of buying multiple licences was still a concern for firms, she said.

Mr Seifman said its e-books would be available for bulk download by firms, which would pay a bulk discounted rate, rather than the recommended retail price for each copy.

CCH, Thomson and LexisNexis expected e-books to cost roughly the same as their paper counterparts, which can sell for more than $300 each. Thomson legal commercial manager Jason Monaghan said this was because it would “add significant value and functionality to our e-books that goes beyond what our paper products are able to offer".

All three publishers’ e-books will include hyperlinks to cases and legislation; search functionality and the ability to take notes. Publishers are looking to add further functionality, such as embedding video and audio, and student self-examination tools.

Sydney University Law Society education officer Claire Burke said e-books would make a huge difference to law students, allowing them to study during the daily commute “without carrying 1000 pages worth of law textbooks" and complementing study techniques that had already changed “drastically".

E-readers had gone from a novelty to an increasingly popular study tool in lecture theatres, she said.

But charging the same price as the hard copy “would be a big opportunity lost" for students, who she suspected would rather pay less and forgo the added functionality.

“At the end of the day we need the content," she said.

LexisNexis director of technology Marc Peter said publishers could not reduce prices as this would deter authors from writing the texts.